ABIDE Project

In 2014 we published a thorough analysis of the ABIDE database where we compared a large number of anatomical measures as estimated from MRI scans of several hundred individuals with autism versus several hundred controls (ages 6-35 years old). The paper is available here. The results of the paper revealed that anatomical differences between individuals with autism and controls were extremely small in comparison to the large variability within each of the groups - suggesting that gross measures of brain anatomy are not useful for identifying individuals with autism.

We performed this study using Freesurfer, a software package that allows one to automatically process anatomical MRI data, identify a large number of regions of interest (ROIs) as defined by an anatomical atlas, and extract the volume, thickness, and surface area of each ROI (image on the right demonstrates the locations of these ROIs).

To facilitate additional attempts to examine this data we make these measures available here:

Demographic and behavioral characteristics of all participating subjects are available here.